by Gene Logsdon
Keeping the kitchen garden small opens up other intriguing possibilities that make gardening enjoyable and recreational. My dream is to surround ours with a stone or brick wall as Scott and Helen Nearing did. The smaller the garden the more affordable a wall. A wall holds in heat and holds out thrashing country winds that folks in town seldom have to deal with-the concentration of houses there acts as a gigantic windbreak. Along with stopping the wind, a wall would radiate warmth absorbed from the sun during the day to the plants at night, and that could mean a week or two more of production at both ends of the season. Frost-shy fruits, like peaches, could be espaliered against the walls as the English do to take advantage of that radiated heat on those nights when a degree or two of coldness could make a difference in saving blossoms or buds from late frost.
More importantly, the wall would keep out rabbits and deer and, with a deep foundation, moles and groundhogs. Even squirrels, raccoons, and chipmunks would find the walls daunting. Since small gardens are so vulnerable to wild animals (a couple of rabbits or a groundhog can ruin a new planting in one night), barriers are important, and a rock or brick wall is beauty forever compared to the annual rigging of rabbit fence or electric fence that most of us have to use.
A wall would provide 100 percent privacy, too, so that on those warm spring days when you feel like shedding most or all of your clothes, you could do so without fear of offending neighbors. I have a theory that the purpose of those English walled gardens was mainly to create a safe haven for nude or almost-nude gardening. Those Victorians, as cultural history is proving, were a pretty wild bunch behind closed doors.
Keeping the garden simple is just as important as keeping it small when you have so many other things to do on the farm. Okay, so it's fun to try out something new and exotic every year. That's one of the functions of your "proving ground." This year we discovered a winter squash, Delicata, which we obtained from Pine Tree Gardens (Box 30, New Gloucester, Maine 04260), to be much better in texture and taste than any of the varieties we have been growing.
But you can overdo the testing of new and exotic plants and end up with a bodge-podge of everything, but not much of anything. Once you have found excellent varieties, quit growing the less satisfying. There will be no more Table Queen, Table King, Butternut, or any other conventional winter squashes in our garden. Also, just because a lettuce variety has a French name doesn't mean it is a bit tastier than Buttercrunch. Grand old heirloom varieties, another hustle, might have more distinctive flavor than new hybrids and then again they might not. Test them before going whole hog. ("Distinctive flavor" as used in many garden catalogs should be translated as "tastes funny.") Nor does an onion from Vidalia or anywhere else necessarily taste any better than one you grow in your own organically enriched backyard soil.
Simplicity has not come easy for me. I've had to learn the hard way that I might just as well stick baseball bats in my yard and expect them to root and grow baseballs as to plant apricot trees and expect to get apricots. The same with Green Gage plums. We quit raising turnips, rutabagas, and parsnips because we finally admitted we didn't really like them. I got rid of all those onion things called nest onions, Egyptian onions, and potato onions which I had formerly been known to praise in print. Yes, for about a week very early in spring, they are fairly good but very soon the regular green onion scallions come along and they taste so much better that the wait is worth it.
The keep-it-simple rule applies even more, I think, if one decides to try to sell garden produce. In this case reliability is everything. Trial and error of thirty years in the garden has taught me that if I were to try retail sales, I should concentrate on asparagus, raspberries, strawberries, tomatoes, and sweet corn. These are the foods that by testing in the garden we know we can grow well and dependably on a larger scale.
Cottage farmers have some built-in advantages in keeping the kitchen garden simple. Because they have a relatively large amount of land compared to a city gardener, they can grow some of their food in other places on the farm. Sweet corn for example we usually treat as part of the farm operation, not the garden, especially in years when we want to grow a surplus to sell or give to other family members. Then I plant several very long rows along the edge of the field corn or in various plots around the farm, and care for them as part of the farm crop.
We generally view other crops that take up considerable room and which we plant in some quantity, as part of the farm, not the garden: pumpkins, cantaloupes, and watermelons to be exact. We generally plant these along the edge of the cornfield too. Farmers who follow new rotational pasture systems are planting turnips and kale for winter grazing and so obviously they could harvest some for themselves, too.
On a cottage farm, food from the wild also helps to keep the garden simple and small. Wild raspberries, blackberries, persimmons, pawpaws, hickory nuts, mushrooms, black walnuts, wild salad plants, and fish from farm ponds all figure in our diet and relieve some of the pressure to expand the kitchen garden. Perhaps the best examples of this kind of simplification are the many wild apple trees I have planted here and there around our farm. As it turns out, these trees are producing as much fruit, of as good a quality, as the commercial varieties I purchased for the formal orchard. We don't spray them, don't prune them, don't fertilize them. Just eat the fruit. By making apple production a function of the wilder side of the farm, we have simplified the formal orchard out of existence.
The Proving Ground is Our Common Ground
But taking into account all I have said, the most valuable transfer from garden to farm is cultural, not technological. It is in the garden that we get down on our hands and knees and feel the soil draw us into an understanding of the interrelationships between all living things. One generality that comes close to being always true in my experience is that farmers who do not garden or who have never gardened, tend to be insensitive to the biological nature of their work and therefore inattentive to all nature including human nature. Urbanites who do not garden are even worse in this regard since they have no frame of reference at all for coming to grips with the realities of biology. They not only don't understand what farmers are up against, but cannot see that these problems are everybody's concern.
On the other hand, the more gardeners immerse themselves in their biological art, the more they not only understand farmers but become farmers-nurturers of life. Indeed, no matter how small the garden, even as small as a miniature planting of mosses inside a gallon jar, the biological activity going on there is a microcosm of the farm.
It seems to .me that the garden is the only practical way for urban societies to come in close contact with the basic realities of life, and if that contact is not close, it is not meaningful at all. To feel the searing heat as well as the comforting warmth of the sun, or to endure the dry wind as well as the soothing breeze; to pray for rain but not too much rain; to long for a spate of dry weather but not too long; to listen to the music of nature as well as the rock beat of human culture; to know that life depends on eating and being eaten; to accept the decay of death as the only way to achieve the resurrection of life; to realize that diversification of species, not multiplication within a species, is the responsibility of rational intelligence-nature will handle that latter activity much better than we can; to grow in personal simplicity while appreciating biological complexity, so that in the garden there is time to sit and think, to produce good food for the mind-these are all part of an education that the industrial world hungers for but cannot name.
We humans are only beginning to understand the wondrous world in the soil beneath our feet. We still call this inner sanctum of life "dirt." How shall we change our view, how shall we learn how to insure the continuance of a biologically healthful earth now that humans gain the power, more and more, to destroy the earth? Where, but in the daily garden, can this education occur? The conventional farm in the embrace of industrialism can't teach this kind of reverence to society. Even in those instances where the farm coul
d teach these lessons, it is too far away from most peoples' lives.
There are from 10,000 to 40,000 microbes in every teaspoon of soil, microbiologists estimate: tiny animals, tiny plants and fungi, many of them unnamed, many not even identified by a number. Dr. Harry Hoitink, at the Ohio State research center in Wooster, Ohio, who works in this world every day, can become almost lyrical in his descriptions of what he refers to sometimes as an "invisible but exotically beautiful jungle world." He has made some remarkable discoveries about this world: Various microbes in composted organic matter can control diseases in plants without fungicides. The world of soil microorganisms is the magma of life, and yet, as Dr. Richard Harwood at Michigan State University says, science does not have enough long-range data on what effect toxic pesticides have on soil biota. His experiments do show that the healthier and more diverse the microbes of this teeming world, the better plants grow. We need to aim powerful electron microscopes into soils across the nation and beam the sights and scenes of soil life by way of television to all schools, libraries, workplaces, homes, laboratories, churches, and governmental meeting rooms for society to view constantly, as it views the stock market reports and sport games. We could then watch this unseen life unfold and know who is winning, who is profiting, as trillions of living forms are engaged there in the sublimely feverish exchange of life and death. How quickly humankind's ideas on farming systems-and on life in general-would blossom with new understanding and wisdom.
I know of only two ways to move humans to become vitally inter ested in the very substance of life: By fascination or by starvation. Surely fascination is the better choice. Being thus entertained in the garden, urban and rural society would join hands in the preservation of nature and turn the earth into a garden of Eden.
CHAPTER 4
The Peaceable Kingdom
of the Barnyard
What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man.
Attrihutecl to Chief Seattle, 1855
Innocent nature lovers think of wilderness as a place where they can go to quaff a little tranquillity-as if tranquillity could be bottled and sold like spring water. They are able to coddle such a fancy only because civilization, which they in certain moods pretend to loathe, allows them to "experience" nature's seeming peacefulness without having to come to grips with its unrelenting violence. They do not understand that Mother Nature can just as often be Old Bitch Nature. They drive a van into the mountains or fly a plane onto a secluded lake, taking along enough industrial luxuries to keep them comfortable for a week or two. They sip the wilderness briefly. They shoot off guns. Roar motors. Guzzle beer. Play cards. Click cameras. Life doesn't get any better than this, but they hurry back to civilization as soon as they run out of food and film.
Nature is a vast killing field. No bug, plant, or animal including humans can live unless other bugs, plants, or animals die. All we do is trade corporeal forms around the gaming table of existential matter.
Wild animals live with one eye over their shoulders watching for predators, and the other eye looking ahead for prey. I listen to a redwinged blackbird, warbling his sweet song from a bush above the creek. How contented he sounds. In reality, ornithologists believe that the translation of that sweet song goes something like this: "This is my terri tory and if I catch any other redwing trying to move in here, I will peck his beady little eyes out." And that may be as close to contentment as a songbird ever comes.
Domestic animals enjoy much more tranquillity than wild animals. My two hogs live a life of comparative luxury, snuggled in their straw, deigning to roll out occasionally to eat the food I put before them. My cow lies languidly in the shade while I sweat in the hay field. Her only real stress in life are the flies that in July swarm around her.
If these animals are slaughtered for meat in the end, so too do the wild ones die. Watch an owl tear the guts out of a rabbit. Watch a black rat snake swallow a ground sparrow. Watch a fox pounce on a mouse. Watch wolves hamstring the aging white-tailed buck, too old to run away. Which death is worse, really: the old buck, half starved, stiffened with arthritis, torn slowly to pieces by wolf fangs, or the buck in its prime, shot by a man? In the wilderness the only unnatural death is a natural death.
Even the barnyard can be dangerous ground. If I were to faint in my pig pen, these seemingly lovable porkers would eat me. Hundreds of children on the farms of yesterday bore witness to this fact, and distraught parents learned of the tragedy by spying a pig running across the barnyard with a bloody arm or leg in its mouth. Life is by nature dangerous. That is the first lesson an education should teach, but education does not teach it, and as a result we have a modern human society insisting on a zero risk environment that cannot be.
To maintain a modicum of tranquillity in the barnyard, there are three cardinal principles that I try to follow. The first is to realize that animals do not like change. I establish a routine with them and stick to it as much as possible.
Secondly, in teaching them a routine, or a necessary change in that routine, I don't try to force the issue. I bribe them with food. For example, until she gets used to the idea, a new heifer is afraid to stick her neck through the neckhold of her stanchion. Trying to force her only causes mayhem. I put grain in her feed box in such a way that she must put her head through the stanchion in order to reach it. The first few times she obliges, I do not try to close the stanchion against her neck. About the third day, while she gobbles away, I can slip the neckhold closed and she hardly notices.
Thirdly, I have learned not to try to handle just one animal alone unless the animal is accustomed to being alone. A flock of sheep want to be together and an individual sheep will, like a teenager, get very upset if separated from its crowd. In a pen alone, it will panic when I try to catch it and hurt itself (or me) trying to jump out. When I need to catch a couple of ewes to trim their hooves, I coax all the sheep in the barn with food and let a bunch of them jam into one pen. Then I can push my way gently through them to catch very easily the one I want. Likewise we can worm the lot of them while they stand placidly together. When shearing, bunch the sheep as close to the shearing platform as possible. That way, you don't have to chase them, and it means less distance to move the animal to be shorn after you catch it. Then it will remain quieter during shearing because it can see the other sheep close by.
Kindness to animals is well worth the effort, but never take for granted that the animals will be kind to each other. Put a strange hen in with your flock and the resident chickens will peck her to a bloody pulp. A boss cow will butt cows lower in the herd pecking order away from her self-ordained place at the feed bunk. If there is not enough room for all, the cow at the bottom of the social order may not get enough to eat. If cows have horns, the social order problem can get gory, pun notwithstanding. The humane way of removing horns is to do the job when the horn buds first protrude on the calves' head. The dehorning paste will then burn away the bud with the least amount of pain. A better solution would be to breed the polled (hornless) characteristic into all cattle or at least, as an individual cottager, to raise only polled breeds.
Despite these nastier tendencies of animals, our barnyard is a much more peaceable kingdom than either the wilderness or the bleak concrete and steel-cage realm of the animal factories. Needless to say, it is also far more peaceable than the public haunts of humans where senseless violence unconnected to the food chain of eating and being eaten threatens to reduce "civilization" to hellish chaos. My hens are in a little danger from hawk and Great Horned owl, fox and coyote, but not nearly as much as I risk merely driving on a public road on a Friday night when the drunken drivers are weaving their way homeward.
The hens wander through barnyard and field where food can be found at every turn, and then go to roost in a safe coop at night. They sing as they stroll on their daily rounds, a sound that recalls to me the time when every ba
rnyard was full of animals and every farmhouse full of farmers and we were all so full of food and comfort that we could not believe the news-that people in New York City were standing in bread lines. Why didn't they go to the country and get a piece of land, Grandpaw would keep asking. It seemed so simple to him, secure in his barnyard with centuries of survival music to assure him: hens clucking, hogs squealing, cattle lowing, sheep blatting, roosters crowing, horses whinnying, bees buzzing, calves bawling, sons arguing, daughters giggling, and Grandmaw calling him in to dinner. If we lived such a dull life compared to our "urban counterparts," as the sociologists (the sons and daughters of those breadlines) say we did, why was my family always singing?
Having only a few animals, and getting to know them well, I fall into the habit of talking to them. If I discourse on the inevitability of death, they, of course, do not understand. At least I don't think so. But they understand plenty about subjects of interest to them, like food and security. When I am carrying the bucket we reserve for table scraps, the hen flock will shun their normal milled grain and follow me all over the barnyard. They love table scraps above all other morsels. I think of the millions and millions of tons of table scraps that go by way of garbage disposals into the sewer systems of America. For our wastefulness, we deserve to stand in breadlines.
If I pitch my voice into a high tremulous wail, mimicking the faint siren-like call that the hens use themselves to signal danger, young chicks will dash to their coop. If I mimic that same sound to an egg that is about to hatch, the chick within will stop peeping. If I cluck like mother hen normally does to signal all is well, it will start peeping again.